What would Christmas be without death?

Well, life decided I needed more loss this holiday season. I had already lost a cat before Thanksgiving, right after my wife and I had our five year anniversary, but that wasn’t enough, the hits keep on coming. I woke up less than a few days before Christmas and my dog was dead in my bed. He wasn’t even old, or that sick that I thought, but, you know, life. It likes to rip away your only remaining comforts.

The thing about it is, I had put a lot of myself into that dog, he was my closest companion and friend. He was as close as I thought I was going to get to a son, and God, Satan, whatever power is in this world decided it was time to take him away. It’s put a major stumbling block into my faith, I’ll be honest. Because suddenly I’m not Abraham, not promised some great reward, I’m Job, being tested over and over again for how much suffering it will take me to break. I never got the impression God liked Job. Or worse, am I Jonah, just being where I’m supposed to be on time to say whatever I’m supposed to say, resisting along the way? God wasn’t a big fan of Jonah either.

I’ve been diving a lot into narrative psychology, that’s been my main comfort through the whole thing, stories are the only comfort humans have against the madness of pain that life will continue to inflict on us. The story that gives me a lot of comfort are the many takes on It’s a Wonderful Life, there are more of them than you think including Raising Hope the tv show and It’s a Wonderful Knife. Alternate takes, like It’s a Wonderful Knife are really good for the kind of pain I’ve been in, because that’s the world I live in now, one where things went wrong.

The same is true for a lot of Christmas movies though, if they’ve been around long enough. There are definitely enough Grinch movies. You can get a decent contrast between the animated cartoon Grinch and The Mean One, they both hit the same philosophical points.

I wish someone loved Rankin Bass enough to really commit to a modern retelling that captured Year without a Santa Claus or any of the other classics.

I didn’t find a new Christmas horror movie this year, because Christmas delivered a horror worse than anything a director or special effects crew could come up with. Again this is why I watch horror, trying to find something scarier than life.  It doesn’t exist, life will rip your heart out better than film can manage.

I discovered the Christmas Chronicles with Kurt Russell, which was lovely and magical. Only two movies in the series though, which was a little sad. My wife wants to wait until next month to get me another dog, so I’m just living with the emptiness, it’s not my choice, it’s just the way it is. I have a dog, and two cats, so I’m not totally alone, it’s just, I have survivor’s guilt. I’ve watched people die, I’ve watched animals die, and I’m still here, and what am I doing with it?

Not a lot, I’ll tell you that. I’m working on getting into grad school, I guess I’m going to get back into video games, Star Rupture comes out tomorrow. Factory games have always been a good place to bury myself. I started smoking again, because fuck the job market right now. Well, vaping my THC herb I had set aside. I know how to quickly get sober if I need to. I came very near to quitting vaping, but that didn’t happen, because me quitting anything in the face of the pain I’m in is just phenomenally unlikely. At one point my eyes were bloodshot and I looked like a real honest to god junkie for a minute, but that was mostly how sick I got from bad furnace filters.

I thought I had covid, I thought it would really kill me, which would have been a relief, to be honest. I didn’t vaccinate this year, neither did my wife. However I took medicine, I took rest, I ate, and I recovered. I hydrated too. The body knows how to come back, blasted thing. I’ve tried to put it down a few times over the years, to no lasting effect. I think some illness took my dog, but who knows now.

It’s the weather in this blasted place, we get summer in the winter and that kills a lot of things. It’s the first week of January and we’ve got weather like summer or spring, it should be snowing or ice outside, but not Oklahoma, Oklahoma is getting hit hard by climate change.

so that’s how I’m doing. Not well. Yet I get back up and do the work I’ve got to do. That’s my job, to keep this house running. I pay the bills, keep the lights on, and I do that well.

It’s just, my skin doesn’t show how I feel, nor my body for that matter. I’d be a used up junkie, or an old man if my body reflected the attacks I am constantly under. Not for the first or the last time I wished for heroin to numb my pain, if I was in a different timeline, in a more corrupt world the needle would have been there. I wished to be at the end of the story as well, old and used up, there are chemicals that could hasten my aging, but I don’t have access.

So for whatever reason, I’m a contradiction, a paradox, a young man in a world where I should be dead. The consequence of the war on drugs, that’s what I am. Granted, I’d estimate everyone under age 40 is suffering the same consequences.